Saturday, December 11, 2010

Slogging away at Beethoven

Months came, months went, and I still hadn't started working on it. I finally began focusing on it sometime in the summer. This is not an easy piece! I mentioned some of the difficulties with it here. The first movement alone has a whole bag of tricks you have to learn, with a first theme composed of a fidgety, nearly impossible motif involving double thirds, and a recurring bridge of trills in octaves, capped off with a closing figure of double broken octaves. Just that opening alone makes this one of the most impossible sonatas to manage reliably. And that's just the first movement.

By October I shelved the idea of learning and recording all four movements for this occasion and have been concentrating on the first. With only a few days left to get something in digits, I am resigned to merely scratching the surface (if "scratching" is the right word here -- maybe if this were on the cello?).

The main thing I logged on here to say, though, is that even though my efforts fall far short of the ideal, just having the goal (date set to record and post) and some points of comparison (e.g., the Perahia recording I've been listening to) have pushed them way farther than what they could have been. Knowing I would have to sit down and play through the whole movement, with the repeat, without stopping, at somewhere near the preferred tempo, and have a permanent recorded record of it, is quite the motivator.

(And knowing that the professional recordings probably involve at least some amount of splicing and doctoring eases some of the frustration.)

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Well-Tempered Clavier Project

I am on a quest to learn all 48 sets of preludes and fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, "learning" including memorizing. I thought it might be interesting to collect all of my Bach efforts in one place; see the list below. Clicking on the link will open the recording so you can listen to it.

The recordings are in reverse chronological order (oldest last). The earliest was recorded in 2006.

I am NOT implying that these are definitive interpretations! Rather, this is meant to document my development as an amateur pianist.

I have actually learned these others as well but never tried recording them; maybe someday I will go back and resurrect them:

WTC II/20 in A minor
WTC I/21 in B flat major
WTC I/1 in C major
WTC I/2 in C minor